I was lucky. Using a barrage of open browser windows I managed to order one of the £89 bargains via Best Buy. I didn’t fully believe I’d succeeded until it turned up on my doorstep two days later.

I’m not the first to say that the TouchPad itself is a lovely piece of hardware and, following the immediate over-the-air update, webOS is stable, capable, reasonably fast and well-thought out. Indeed, looking at the package as a whole, whilst the hardware is not quite as luxurious as the iPad 2, I would place webOS well ahead of iOS4 largely due to its effortless multitasking. It’s a technological tragedy that this device and its OS are now a thing of the past.

According to isuppli.com, the TouchPad costs £200 in materials and labour to build, almost exactly the same as the iPad 2. Conventional logic is to take the build cost and add a margin to come to your retail price, aligning yourself to comparable hardware. This lead to a release price of £399 for the 16GB model which is on a par with the iPad 2.

The problem with this is that it gives potential buyers no good reason to choose the newcomer over the established giant. I estimate that Apple makes around £150-£200 profit on each iPad sold and uses the AppStore to drive hardware sales (although their 30% share of the projected £2 billion pound of revenue the AppStore will earn in 2011 is hardly to be sniffed at).

HP couldn’t hope to do the same with such a limited app store, so the only way it could have made an impact would have been to reverse the logic – make its long term money from apps rather than the hardware. Had the TouchPad been launched at £250 it could easily have been a massive success, which would have created an audience for app developers to target. Particularly the work-related apps that HP’s business image would suit. HP could then have taken a cut of its app store revenue.

The problem is that this approach takes time, with HP barely breaking even on the hardware, let alone the associated R&D and marketing costs. Looked at this way, the TouchPad was doomed as soon as HP chose the webOS route – however good the OS is, it has only limited developer support.

Android-based tablets have more chance because developers can target more than one device with a single app. But the real challenger to Apple is likely to be Amazon. It’s already demonstrated with the latest version of the Kindle that it’s prepared to sell hardware at a market-breakingly low price in order to make money on downloads. As an example, I paid £109 for my Kindle in October last year but I reckon I’ve spent around £300 on books in less than a year since. A £250 Android-based Amazon tablet locked to its app store would blow the market apart.

The lesson for small businesses is to never lose sight of where the money really is. Apple is, as usual, the exception to the rule in that it’s able to make profit from every part of the process – the mistake HP made was to imagine it could duplicate Apple’s success. Bill and Dave, you’re no Apple.

After its announcement last week, this is the first opportunity we’ve had for a hands-on with HP’s WebOS-equipped TouchPad. If you haven’t had the chance to check out the news story covering the announcement, the core details are pretty straightforward.

The TouchPad is a 10in tablet, with a resolution of 1,024 x 768, running a tablet-optimised version of webOS, the mobile operating system HP inherited when it acquired Palm. Under the hood is a meaty dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm 8060 processor, there’s a 1.3-megapixel webcam on the front for making video calls with (but no camera on the rear), and HP will be selling the device in 16GB and 32GB versions. Initially only the Wi-Fi version will be available, but 3G-enabled versions will follow soon after.

So what is it like in the flesh? Well, it’s still four months away from being unleashed on the public, so there’s unsurprisingly the odd creak here and there, but otherwise it’s remarkably polished. There isn’t much to say about the front, other than it’s made from Corning’s scratch- and shatter-resistant Gorilla glass. All you see is the webcam and a small button in the centre of one of its short edges.

The rear panel is subtly curved and finished in polished black plastic, and it already feels up to snuff – it feels solid in the hand and the curved edges and corners make it very comfortable to hold. A quick session with the on-screen keyboard revealed the capacitive touchscreen to be as sensitive as you might expect, and on first impression HP has made a great start on customising the smartphone-focused webOS apps and user interface.

Particularly impressive is the email app, which elegantly presents your messages in a number of different ways: full message view emails take up the whole screen; drag a small handle at the bottom-left corner of the screen and a navigation view is revealed in a panel to the left; drag another handle and all your email inboxes appear in yet another panel. It sounds as if the screen might become crowded, but it doesn’t – especially in landscape mode. Another neat touch is the notifications menu: you can use this to directly browse and manage  emails without having to launch the full email app.

As for third-party apps, HP says “well-written” ones should display just as well on the touchpad screen as they do on the company’s smartphones. However, it says the new Enyo development platform should allow developers to write once and have their apps work just as well across all webOS devices.

As with previous webOS-based devices, the TouchPad handles multitasking beautifully. Hit the button on the edge of the screen and up pops the “card view”, representing the various applications running in the background; sweep left and right and the cards all scroll by, just as smoothly as they do on the Palm Pre 2.

Other notable features include “touch to share”, which uses HP’s next-generation Touchstone technology to transfer information between other webOS smartphones and the TouchPad, simply by resting the phone momentarily on the tablet’s edge. In demonstration we were shown a web page being sent from the TouchPad to the new Palm Pre3 (more on this beauty later on), which was a little underwhelming but HP promises there is “more to come”.

As with the BlackBerry PlayBook, it’s a positive first showing; it’s just a shame we have to wait until the summer for it.

Unsurprisingly, I’m really impressed. The new chassis is wonderfully neat and tidy, sturdy and not as heavy as I was expecting. It’s certainly a good looking machine. I’ve only got one little criticism (if you exclude the hefty price) – the touchpad.

Getting rid of the button is an inspired decision. Under Mac OS X I rarely find myself using the physical button at all, opting instead for a light tap on the pad itself. This works perfectly well, all the time, as you don’t need two mouse buttons. The problem here is that Apple has chosen to make the whole pad a physical button, instead of just taking away the button below the pad. Press firmly and the whole thing depresses, and it’s distracting.

I found myself trying to press and stroke as lightly as possible, so as to not press the button. Sure, after a week or two I might get used to it, but my first impressions are not good. I seriously think that if I was to replace my current (and suddenly very old-fashioned) MacBook, I would have to attempt to open up that innovative new case and jam up the button with a thin piece of card.

Of course, I could always just opt for another manufacturer, but it seems unlikely. That case is very good looking…